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The Future of American Youth?

In France, we’re seeing the impact on the nation’s youth of their government-managed economy, magnified by the union-driven difficulty (near impossibility, actually) of getting rid of extraneous labor (or even bad workers). Spiegel Online International offers some insight.

Kafui Affram doesn’t feel at home in either environment, not in the suburb where the 22-year-old still lives in his childhood room in his parents’ little house [or in Paris, his suburb’s parent city].

Still living with his parents. Just like America’s youth, especially in the Age of Obamacare.

Some 23 percent of the country’s 18- to 24-year-olds live in poverty, according to a study by the National Institute for Youth and Community Education (INJEP).

The poverty rate for America’s youth as recently as 2009 was 20%. It’s not going to improve any time soon; the unemployment rate for America’s youth was 17.1% in July 2012, at the height of the summer season for employing our youth, and the unemployment rate for their parents has been hovering around 10% for the last four years after factoring in the effect of our shrinking labor participation rate. Then,

Youth unemployment in France has been high for some time, but it has now climbed to 26%. For decades, regardless of their political affiliation, lawmakers have been promising to create a better situation for young people. But exactly the opposite has happened. Labor laws protect those who already enjoy steady jobs, while the economic crisis and recession have limited the number of new jobs created.

On Socialist President François Hollande and his program for creating of “future jobs,” Affram says,

We’re used to politicians constantly coming up with new ideas.

Yeah, we’ve heard that, too, and from the same sort of source. With the same degree of confidence that Affram has:

I know I should be optimistic and have goals, but it’s mostly all just bleak.